South MS is a hotspot for vaccine skepticism, data shows. ‘It’s worrying us’

The number of families refusing to vaccinate their children is growing across the Mississippi Coast, which has recorded more religious exemptions to vaccines than any other part of the state.

New data from the State Department of Health shows that there are now nearly 700 children across Harrison and Jackson counties who are unvaccinated because of their families’ religious beliefs.

Mississippi began allowing the exemptions two years ago.

The data also shows, when compared with each county’s childhood population, that George and Stone counties have the second and third highest rates of religious exemptions in the state.

Physicians and public health officials say the scale of vaccine holdouts so far does not appear to threaten herd immunity, which a community reaches when enough residents are vaccinated that together they stop a disease’s spread. But they called the trend troubling.

“It’s worrying us,” said David Reeves, a pediatrician for Memorial Health System. “It’s a very frustrating time to be a doctor.”

Mississippi has long had some of the highest childhood vaccination rates in the nation. But the numbers have dipped as distrust over immunization reaches a fever pitch across the country. A measles outbreak that began in West Texas this year has hospitalized dozens and killed two unvaccinated children. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has embraced false claims about vaccines, also became the nation’s health secretary. Last month, he named several vaccine skeptics to a powerful advisory panel. And last week, the group voted to rescind longstanding recommendations for some flu vaccines.

Religious exemptions have been rising in Mississippi since 2023, after several South Mississippi parents backed by an anti-vaccine group allied with Kennedy sued the state and won.

Now, data shows Harrison and Jackson counties each have 348 children exempt from vaccination on the basis of religion. Across the six coastal counties, 1,066 children are exempt.

What’s driving the shift?

Most children in Mississippi are still getting immunized. But doctors say the state will grow vulnerable to disease outbreaks if exemptions keep rising. Herd immunity only works if at least 95 percent of a community is vaccinated.

State Epidemiologist Renia Dotson said this week it was “just a matter of time” until vaccination rates reach that point. She approves new exemptions every day.

“It’s a steady increase,” she said. “The whole country is going through this vaccine skepticism and hesitancy right now.”

Pediatricians and public health officials attributed the rise of religious exemptions to several factors. Dotson said the exemptions are more common in affluent parts of the state. Reeves said the exemptions appear more rooted in personal freedom than religion because the skeptics he sees are often Baptist, Methodist or Catholic and no major religions officially oppose vaccination.

Some parents have described the new exemption process as a relief and say they object to the use of aborted fetal cells in vaccine development. Vaccines for chickenpox and rubella, among other diseases, were developed with cells from fetuses aborted in the 1960s.

Doctors say the rising skepticism is forcing them to brush up on knowledge of symptoms associated with once-eradicated diseases most physicians have never had to treat.

Reeves, who practices in Long Beach, said he has started seeing more patients who oppose vaccination and also standard practices, such as a vitamin K injection given to newborns that lowers the risk of severe bleeding. Patricia Tibbs, a pediatrician in Ellisville and president of the Mississippi Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said some parents have told her they trust her guidance on everything but vaccines.

Mississippi requires schoolchildren to get several vaccines, including those for polio, chickenpox and measles. The state’s childhood vaccination rate now hovers around 97.5 percent.

But Dotson said herd immunity can be hard to track. Some children who have already received certain vaccines are now getting religious exemptions after middle school. The number of children whose families are applying for exemptions at birth is also increasing. Only about a third of the state’s religious exemptions are for students who attend a public, private or church school, according to the department of health. The rest cover infants, homeschooled students and children who attend daycare or preschool.

Tibbs said pediatricians across the state have been scrambling to counter misinformation with science since the COVID-19 pandemic launched a new wave of vaccine hesitancy.

Vaccines, she added, have been so successful at eliminating disease that the painful memories of children’s deaths from decades-old outbreaks are fading.

“There’s this collective forgetting,” she said.

This story was originally published July 2, 2025 at 5:30 AM.